Robert Frost would tip his cap to Marla Dickerson. When the legendary poet wrote “The Road Not Taken,” he most certainly had journeys like Dickerson’s in mind. Using her finance degree from Gies Business as a foundation, she has forged a highly successful career in journalism. Now an enterprise editor at the news agency Reuters, Dickerson and her team were recognized with the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series on the international trade in the chemicals used to make fentanyl. Dickerson is the first Gies Business alum and just the 26th University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alum to ever win a Pulitzer Prize.

For Dickerson, that road began in nearby St. Joseph, Ill. It has taken her to New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo, Brazil, and beyond.

Growing up, the University of Illinois was a big part of her life, from following Mike White’s high-octane Illini football team in the early 1980s to enjoying piping-hot slices of Garcia’s pizza and exploring the wonders of Allerton Park. Illinois was the only school she applied to, and she followed her brother, Barry (now the Managing Director of Corporate Relations at Gies Business), into the business school and completed a degree in finance. Her late sister, Marianne, a world-class distance runner, made three Dickersons at Illinois after transferring from Michigan to complete her cross-country and track career in Champaign.

“The College of Business had an excellent reputation and was affordable,” Dickerson said. “I credit Gies Business for providing foundational skills that are transferable to whatever career path you choose.”

Dickerson began her career in Chicago for a subsidiary of a Japanese bank. But with business journalism taking off, she decided to pursue a master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Although her classmates had more on-the-ground experience, she quickly figured out that her business background was an asset.

“Facts are like numbers -- they add up or they don’t,” Dickerson said. “Illinois had given me the tools to think critically, ask the right questions, and sense when something was off when reporting a story. At Illinois in those days, we read actual books (long ones), and we wrote quite a lot. There was no Chat GPT. The analog approach taught me to think conceptually and write clearly on my own.”

While small to medium-sized newspapers are sadly fading into history, for aspiring reporters like Dickerson, they provided a valuable place for mentorship, growth, and exploration. She found that in the now-defunct afternoon daily, Rochester Times-Union in New York, where she covered Kodak, the city’s biggest employer at the time.

“It was a great place to start and learn from terrific colleagues,” Dickerson recalled. “With Kodak, you were seeing glimpses of a company whose business was changing fast. Digital photography was in its infancy, but Kodak ended up ceding the field to rivals, despite building the first prototype digital camera in the 1970s.”

Her work caught the attention of The Detroit News, where she worked first as a business reporter writing about banking and commercial real estate before moving into national coverage. Starting in 1996, Dickerson began a distinguished 18-year stint with the Los Angeles Times, rising to business editor of a 33-member team. Her career has included international postings in Mexico City and São Paulo, the latter as the Brazilian Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal.

“One of the things that had piqued my interest in foreign affairs was a year that I spent studying abroad at the University of Manchester while a student at Illinois,” she said.

It was as a Mexico correspondent for the LA Times when she began to understand the workings of the country’s drug cartels. Those experiences proved invaluable when she edited a series for Reuters, called “Fentanyl Express,” which ultimately won not only a Pulitzer Prize but also the Katherine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability from the White House Correspondents’ Association (WCHA).

“One of the most interesting things about working internationally is getting a view through a different lens,” Dickerson explained. “Many Americans see Mexico’s cartels as the main driver of the narcotics trade that has caused so much addiction and death in the United States. But a lot of Mexicans see America’s appetite for illicit drugs as the force that has given rise to these powerful trafficking groups, which are terrorizing Mexico with unspeakable violence.”

Since 2017, Dickerson has been an editor at Reuters, a global news provider whose content is read and seen by more than a billion people every day. At a time when many traditional news outlets are shrinking and disinformation has exploded, Reuters consistently ranks as one of the world’s most trusted news sources.

“As an editor, my job is to help reporters develop their ideas and stress test them,” Dickerson said. “Is our sourcing solid? Where could we go wrong here? What are the hurdles to investigating an allegation or tip, and how do we surmount them? We strive to get it right and to get it first. We also care about great storytelling. I aim to shape compelling stories, must-reads that people can’t put down.”

Reuters and the Fentanyl Express story

When Dickerson worked in Mexico in the early 2000s, traffickers were mostly moving cocaine and methamphetamine; fentanyl wasn’t yet a part of the vocabulary.

But the forces behind its rise were already in motion. US doctors were overprescribing the painkiller oxycodone. With hundreds of thousands of their patients getting hooked, the government eventually stepped in to make it tougher to write those prescriptions. Cartels spotted an opportunity. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid used in hospital operating rooms worldwide. Traffickers figured out it was an easy drug to synthesize and mold into pills that looked like oxycodone to sell to people who had become addicted. The result: nearly half a million overdose deaths in the past decade.

“The numbers are stunning, and it is an epic failure on so many levels,” Dickerson said. “Much has been written about the devastation on US streets and about the Mexican cartels that traffic that drug. What had remained a mystery was exactly how those traffickers got their hands on the chemical precursors needed to produce fentanyl in vast quantities.”

That was what the Reuters team set out to uncover. The chemicals used to make fentanyl come mainly from China. They have a wide array of legitimate industrial uses, giving criminals cover to create phony companies to import them. Veteran Reuters investigative reporter Maurice Tamman started analyzing trade records for unusual patterns of shipments moving from China to Mexico.

When that effort hit a wall, Tamman got an idea: Why not buy these chemicals ourselves to get inside the supply chain?

That led the team to a world of shady sellers peddling precursors on sites that were openly catering to the illicit drug trade. Using burner phones and Bitcoin, the reporters purchased everything needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl for just $3,600. Sellers shipped some of the chemicals concealed in cat food bags and sent others in boxes labeled as electronics or doorknobs to avoid scrutiny by customs agents. Independent testing labs confirmed these precursors could be used to cook fentanyl.

“We bought from suppliers who brazenly marketed these chemicals as ingredients for illicit drugs,” Dickerson said. “A couple of them even provided instructions on how to get the precursor ready to be synthesized into fentanyl. It was shocking.”

Despite stepped-up border enforcement by the Trump administration and tariffs on goods from both Mexico and Canada aimed at discouraging fentanyl smuggling, fentanyl remains cheap and abundant on U.S. streets, Dickerson said.

Still, the Reuters series has gained the attention of policymakers, regulators, and law enforcement. Less than two weeks after the first installment of the series ran, China finally regulated three fentanyl precursors it had promised to control since 2022. And it spurred calls from US lawmakers to reform a trade rule that has made it difficult for customs officers to catch fentanyl chemicals at U.S. ports of entry, a change that President Trump recently implemented.

“One of the most rewarding aspects of the job is to shine light into dark places,” Dickerson said. “In doing so, you hope your reporting can help right wrongs, save lives, change laws, and get justice for victims. When that happens, that’s something special.”

While she still has much left to do, she calls the Fentanyl Express series “a story of a lifetime.”

For Dickerson, taking the road less traveled has made all the difference.